New York Magazine – July 08, 2019

66 new york | july 8–21, 2019

and her boyfriend (her father’s killer) en

route to England, Ophelia wanders into

the court having plainly lost her mar-

bles, does a mad scene for the ages, and

goes off and throws herself into a

stream. John Everett Millais immortal-

ized her floating corpse in a famous

painting that inspired Laurence Olivi-

er’s final shot of her in his Oscar-

winning film of Hamlet. Ophelia begins

with another reproduction of Millais’s

painting—except that now Ophelia,

played by the galaxy’s most famous

female Jedi, says in voice-over, “It’s high

time I should tell you my story myself.”

Ophelia goes on to play a kind of

footsie with Hamlet. In every instance

in which Shakespeare’s character is

helpless and indecisive, McCarthy and

Chellas give us a young woman (Daisy PHOTOGRAPH: IFC FILMS

Ridley) who knows her own mind bet-

ter than Hamlet knows his. When this

Ophelia is ordered to pry info from

Hamlet (George MacKay) while

Claudius (Clive Owen) and Polonius

hide behind a balustrade, our heroine

declaims variations of Shakespeare’s

lines while whispering to Hamlet that

he’s being watched. Hamlet’s command

that she go to a nunnery is now for her

protection, given that he’s about to

commit regicide. Ophelia stays, of

course. Danger is her middle name.

Chellas doesn’t borrow lines from

Shakespeare, as in the wittiest of all

Shakespearean stunts, Tom Stoppard’s

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are

Dead; she revises and repurposes them.

But she has concocted some respect-

able poetic banter—Shakespeare Lite—

and sometimes goes in the opposite direc-

tion, making the characters’ plainspokenness

downright cheeky. Polonius (Dominic

Mafham) tells Laertes (Tom Felton), “Don’t

borrow any money or lend it, and above all

be true to yourself.” Ouch. Later, Hamlet

and Ophelia have a bit of romantic dia-

logue: “Call me by my name.” “Hamlet.”

“Ophelia.” It ain’t the balcony scene from

Romeo and Juliet, but the mundanity is the

joke. This Hamlet is self-consciously poetic

and utterly ineffectual. He regularly cocks

things up while complaining that his

mother is “like all women—fickle, frail.”

Ophelia registers this with dismay. Not all

women, you Danish prat.

The female gaze is strong in this one.

Tasked to read to Gertrude (Naomi Watts)

at bedtime, Ophelia discovers that the

queen’s text isn’t religious but medieval soft-

core porn. She and Gertrude have a good

giggle. It seems that Hamlet’s father, Ham-

let Sr., isn’t exactly a tiger in the sack, so why

shouldn’t Gertrude and Claudius have a

fling? It’s not as if she thought he’d turn

around and poison his own brother! (Really,

though, she should have expected it. Owen’s

Claudius, with his lank black locks, is half-

way to Richard III.)

Ridley makes a fine, modern heroine, but

it’s Watts who goes big and waltzes away

with the movie. She plays two roles: Ger-

trude and Gertrude’s hitherto unknown

twin sister, a witch. At various junctures,

Ophelia descends to the witch’s subterra-

nean lair to obtain stimulating “potions” for

her queen. It seems this bitter hellion is try-

ing to turn her royal sister into a medieval

cokehead. As Gertrude, Watts flies into

rages so towering that Steven Price’s music

has to compete to be heard. It’s a nutty,

bombastic score, but anything more modest

would have gotten lost in the histrionics.

To be clear, I have no problem with bold

literary fiddledeedees like Ophelia. No mas-

terpiece is set in stone, and Shakespeare

didn’t invent the story anyway. (Some

scholars—notably Harold Bloom—think

the text we know today was Shakespeare’s

rewrite of his own early, now lost revenge

melodrama, which Bloom calls the “Ur-

Hamlet.”) My issue is that Ophelia, for all its

juice, is laborious—a joke that goes on too

long—and that the original actually does a

better job of inspiring female revolt. This,

Shakespeare says, is what happens to an

innocent young woman in a world in which

men (in conflict with one another) make all

the choices for her—mansplaining leading

literally to tragedy. But I admit that the orig-

inal is terribly depressing and that it’s fun to

think of women taking up arms against not

just kings but the whole Western canon. If

nothing else, it makes people like Harold

Bloom—and me— uncomfortable. ■

ophelia is the ultimate female take-back-the-narrative movie. The

novelist Lisa Klein and now the screenwriter Semi Chellas and director

Claire McCarthy have gotten hold of the character with arguably the least agency

of any in classical theater and given her control over her own destiny—to the point

where they have to twist the source, Hamlet, into the kinds of

knots you’d find in silly heist movies. Ophelia is pretty silly too,

but give its makers points for chutzpah.

To refresh your memory: In Hamlet, the teenage Ophelia is

bullied and bounced around by three men: her priss-pot father,

Polonius; the bloated King Claudius; and her boyfriend, the

Danish prince himself. With her father inadvertently skewered

Take No Man’s Censure

Ophelia gives Shakespeare’s

classic a feminist spin.

MOVIES / DAVID EDELSTEIN

Daisy Ridley, left, and Naomi Watts.

OPHELIA

DIRECTED BY

CLAIRE MCCARTHY.

IFC FILMS.

PG-13.